Blame it on John Mayer

Raise your hand if you love John Mayer’s Room for Squares album. Ok, now keep your hand up if you would say that John Mayer’s Room for Squares album is one of your favorites.  Alright, I see those hands. Now, keep your hand up if you can truthfully say that there was a time when you listened to the aforementioned album so often that you could probably, even today, sing every word of it all the way from “Welcome” to “day” with no help from John. That’s what I thought. Amanda, Maela, you can put your hands down, and I’m gonna put mine down too, mainly because typing the word “aforementioned” one-handed took all the fun out of that paragraph for me.

I love Room for Squares. I’m not a huge John Mayer fan, although I do think he’s both a poet and a melodic genius, but that album spoke to me and made me think and opened my heart toward my generation in a way nothing else had up to that point. Unfortunately, it also ruined any hope of some memoirist or descendant digging up my past through photographs.

I am a world traveler. I’ve gazed into the piercing southern starscape of Zimbabwe, swam in the Indian Ocean in Kenya (on my birthday, no less), and tracked cheetahs in Botswana. I’ve boated through the canals of Bangkok, burned my feet on the white-hot marble of the Taj Mahal, and eaten Korean food in downtown Seoul.  I’ve explored the ruins of Ephesus, hiked to a castle overlooking the Black Sea, and jumped over the trenches of Gallipoli. All that, not to mention climbing the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, seeing the Queen’s dollhouse at Windsor, taking a nap by the Seine, and seeing the Sahara Desert, the Alps, Big Ben, and the Vatican all in one day.

But I have very few pictures of all of that. The seed was planted in college.  I had a professor who talked alot about our generation’s obsession with capturing life on film–whether it be video or photographs. He lamented the fact that we forego enjoying life in favor of taking pictures of it. We don’t live it because we’re so concerned we’re going to miss it–and then we miss it because we’re looking at it through a lens. He made alot of sense to me. And I stopped taking pictures almost entirely. Then John Mayer came along and said it again, stifling any desire to record my life for fear I wouldn’t live it. Here’s what he said:

I’m writing you to catch you up on places I’ve been and you have this letter, probably got excited but there’s nothing else inside it. Didn’t have a camera by my side this time. Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes. Maybe I will tell you all about it when I’m in the mood to lose my way with words.  Today, clouds are painted colors in the cowboy cliche. And strange, how clouds that look like mountains in the sky are next to mountains anyway. Didn’t have a camera by my side this time. Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes. Maybe I will tell you all about it when I’m in the mood to lose my way but let me say you should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes. It brought me back to life. You’ll be with me next time I go outside. No more 3×5’s. Today I finally overcame trying to fit the world inside a picture frame. Maybe I will tell you all about it when I’m in the mood to lose my way…

(And, yes, that was from memory.)

So now I’m faced with a quandary. I’m not a picture taker, and it’s John Mayer’s fault.  I want to see the world with both my eyes. And I have. But now I’m going to Uganda. And I’m going to Uganda not to live my own life, but to live the lives of the orphans there. My purpose is not only to go and enjoy them and have new experiences, but to go and enjoy them and cause you to enjoy them too. To cause you to see the children for who they really are, so that you fall in love with them the same way I fall in love with them, so that you will see them as children who need hope, and love, and opportunities to be who they long to be–just like any other child.

To do that, I have to, for one month, stifle the John Mayer in my head, and look at their world through a lens, with a pen in my hand. That’s the only way you can come with me, and I desperately need you there. Your going to Uganda with me is a large part of the reason I go. I will take pictures and video not because I want to capture the events of my own life, but because I must capture the reality of theirs. You may never see them otherwise. And until you go to them yourself, I will have to try and fit their world inside a picture frame…no matter what John Mayer says.

 

Oh, Glasgow!

Quiz time: What do bedbugs, yellow fever, Scotland, and Chris Thile have in common? I’ll give you a moment to ponder while I wax eloquent about my love/don’t-always-love relationship with this thing we call sanctification (also known as that occasionally grueling onslaught of divinely-doled-out life lessons designed to make Christ-followers more like Christ).

I think I’ve already established the fact that I’m a total nerd, so I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone that sometimes, when my mind is idle, I kind of lazily flip through my mental dictionary and put words in little families.  Not just random families, mind you. Oh no, I put them right where they belong. For instance, magnify goes with magnanimous and magnitude. They’re all about things being big.  And chronology goes with chronic and chronicle…all having to do with time in one way or another. And just now the word sanctification just flitted through my head and its little “sanct” family followed right along behind–sanctity, sanctify, sanctuary. And then it hit me! Sanctification and sanctuary! Hold your horses!

No, seriously, hold them, because I have to give you some background before I unleash this epiphany on you.

The last few weeks have been pretty rotten. Things keep going wrong. Oh nothing major, just those little irritations of life that, taken one at a time, are just a part of being human, but which, when they all flood in on you in rapid succession make you want to tear your hair out and curse the day you were born. Melodrama aside, the last few weeks have been difficult. Things in my apartment keep falling apart, and there are roommate issues, and bugs, and a few emotional blows here and there.  Now, I have recently emerged from a particularly “productive” period of sanctification (read: my own personal hell on earth), and the result has been a deeper intimacy with God as well as finally discovering joy, and more recently hope, that doesn’t depend on circumstances–which is a good thing  since the circumstances of my life don’t exactly look like I thought they would at this point.

So in the last couple of weeks, this person (me) who is joyful and full of hope in Christ, and who honestly believes that everything I face is filtered through the loving hands of my Father, has encountered what, in polite company, I call disappointments, frustrations, and difficulties–but which in my head I call (in a thick Glaswegian accent, of course) TOTAL CRAP. And how does this trusting Christ-follower deal with the aforementioned total crap? She, like a good little girl, continues to trust that it is all part of the plan and that as long as she keeps trusting and keeps obeying what she knows to do, all will be well. Yada, yada, and yada.

The problem with that approach, I discovered, after feeling inexplicably crappy for a couple of weeks even though I was trusting and obeying, is that while hope and joy are by definition immune to circumstances, the intellectual steadfastness they produce doesn’t and shouldn’t translate to the emotional stoicism I found myself trying to maintain. In other words, the fact that my brain understands that the difficulties are part of the plan doesn’t mean my emotional side is capable of staring them in the face without feeling something. My mind was saying, “It’s all gonna be fine,” which is true, and my emotions were trying to say, “Yeah, I agree,” but what they really wanted to say was, in the words of the famously eloquent Samir Nagheenanajar of “Office Space” fame, “This…is…a…suck!” Unfortunately, even though that’s how my emotions were feeling, they didn’t feel justified in saying so, because they knew, right along with my intellect, that things really were going to be fine. The problem is, my mind and my emotions weren’t designed to respond to disappointments, frustrations, and difficulties in the same way.  So when my emotions try for steadfastness through stoicism, they hamstring my trusting intellect, and the whole faith-horse ends up hobbling around in circles, fighting no battles, and not even giving the Hero a chance to get on. In short, an un-emotional, stoic faith is an impotent faith.

That’s where the relationship between sanctification and sanctuary comes in. When I was younger, like, last year, disappointments, frustrations, and difficulties would have likely resulted in a demonstrative and probably fairly soggy pity party.  But “sanctification” and “fairly-soggy-pity-party” are not in a word family together.  Becoming more like Christ is, in fact, mutually exclusive with pity parties. “Sanctification” and “sanctuary” are part of the same family because they are a part of the same process.

When the hunchback, Quasimodo, looked out over the courtyard of Notre Dame to see a mob of angry Frenchmen rushing toward the church, hearts full of blood-lust, he frantically cried out “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” He sought refuge in the church and refused to leave until the courtyard was quiet and safe.

Part of sanctification is learning to cry “sanctuary!” in the face of the total crap rushing toward my own church doors. It is acknowledging the difficulties, trusting that all will be well, hiking up my emotional petticoats, and running full-gallop into the refuge of God’s unwavering goodness. Outside in the courtyard, I can trust that the Hero, sword flashing, is cutting down the bloodthirsty hordes and, oh, by the way, helping my steadfast, trusting intellect to use its sword too. Meanwhile, inside the door, my emotions should be turning all that freak-out energy into prayer, into a passionate cry for relief and victory over the mobs outside. The intellect was built to fight with the Truth; the emotions were crafted to fight with fervent, relentless prayer.

So the next time (don’t forget to use the accent) TOTAL CRAP breaks loose in my courtyard, I’m going to let the different parts of me fight the way they were designed to fight. I will trust in the goodness of my God and His plan, and my intellect will not waver. And I will take the frustration and the irritation and that feeling that I’m drowning slowly from the inside out, and instead of having a pity-party on the one hand or attempting not to feel anything at all on the other hand, I’m gonna cry “sanctuary” and run with all my might to my Father’s feet and turn it all into prayer. …and maybe next time it won’t take me weeks to get there.

***

And now back to the brain-busting riddle that I’m sure you’ve already forgotten about. What do bed bugs, yellow fever, Scotland, and Chris Thile have in common? They were all a part of my life this week! Bed bugs: one of the difficulties/frustrations I had in the last few weeks were bed bugs. We had a big problem with them, but I think they might be gone now due to copious amounts of bed bug spray, a little Vaseline, and strict adherence Mad-Eye Moody’s call for “Constant Vigilance.” Yellow fever: I was able to get my vaccinations for Uganda this week.  It turned out that I only needed one shot and one set of pills, so the vaccinations were alot cheaper than I had planned for! Yay!

Scotland needs its own paragraph. I think I will save the Scotland ramble for another post, but suffice it to say, the Lord has spoken. He said, “Woman, you need a vacation.” Far be it from me to deny Him, so I’m going to Scotland. Thanks to some very generous friends and family, I was able to buy my plane ticket to Uganda this week.  I had planned on the ticket being a certain amount, and had already decided that I wanted to take a couple of days’ layover in England (for reasons I’m sure I’ll share at some point or another), so I planned to spend a little extra of my own money and stop over for a quick vay-cay. But lo and behold, when I booked the ticket, staying over in England actually made it a couple hundred dollars CHEAPER than it would have been had I taken a straight flight!! So I’m going up to Scotland, the land of fairy tales and men in skirts. What more could a girl ask for?

And finally Chris Thile. If you don’t know who Chris Thile is, I truly hurt for you. Look him up. Former member of Nickel Creek–best band ever–current member of Punch Brothers. Mandolin virtuoso, musical genius, tortured lyricist. And I got to see him live for free this week. Seeing Chris Thile live is like drinking a warm cup of Earl Gray on a porch swing on a rainy day, wrapped up in a blanket, listening to distant thunder, dreaming of secret gardens and country lanes filled with honeysuckle. In other words, I’d highly recommend it. If you’d like an exclusive Amanda-recommended playlist, let me know.

And those are the haps. Long? yes. Informative? absolutely. Life-altering? I guess we’ll know the next time total crap breaks loose!

 

Us, Ourselves, and We

In the spirit of relieving you from all the alien talk, I’d like to fill you in on the book situation–the reason I started blogging in the first place.  I’m going to Uganda for a month in about six weeks to do research for a book I’d like to write highlighting the lives of the orphans there. The following is adapted from my project proposal:

All too often, when we think of Africa, images of half-naked, fly-covered, big-bellied children immediately flash across our minds. In the last several decades, we have been covered over with pleas for aid and money and prayers. We look at these children and wonder what will become of them. We feel sad for them, and we despair of them, and we turn away. We’re not hard-hearted ethno-centric monsters. On the contrary, I believe we desire to help these children, but the task is so enormous and the need is so great and the problem so very distant that we don’t know where to begin, so we never begin.

The images with which we’ve been bombarded for so long have, in many cases, served the opposite purpose than that for which they were intended. They meant to show us suffering at its most shocking, at its most bleak, so that we would be compelled to act on behalf of those who suffer. What they have instead accomplished on the whole is the widening of the already great chasm between Us and Them. We are snug in our homes with our healthy and happy loved ones gathered around us. They are cold and alone and in great need. The chasm has widened so much that we don’t even have a point of reference from which to relate to these widows and orphans thousands of miles and three worlds away. We have labored under the guilt of not helping the poor and neglected of the world for years and years, but we have failed to discover the key that will prompt us to action.

I believe that the key is a change in our perspective. We must see the world’s needy in a different, more accurate light. As long as We see the hopeless and needy across the chasm as Them, as Other, We will not be moved to action. It’s not in our nature to help the Other. But if We can begin to understand the truth of the matter, which is that They are not Other at all, but simply another part of Us, we will take the suffering that our little brothers and sisters on the other side of the world face and will make it our own.

How do we, then, begin to make the shift from seeing them as Them to seeing them as Us? We take a look at their whole lives. We don’t see them just as orphans. We don’t look at the flies and the disease and the lack alone. We look at them as people—as musicians, as scientists, as gigglers and dancers. We add to the images of their tears images of their infectious laughter. We see them from the inside out. But we don’t forget the outside. We take the whole person—hardships and triumphs, fears and joys, need and abundance, and we see that we are not all that different after all. We will see that the chasm that separates us is man made—and that it can be not only spanned, but eliminated altogether.

I have been fascinated in recent years by the genre that Barnes and Noble has called the “Travel Essay.” These are not the Lonely Planet travel guides you see in the back pocket of wannabe explorers all over the world. The travel essay is a mix between a memoir, a history, a journalistic narrative, and an ethnography. It is the story of a place told through the eyes of its people, and the story of a people revealed through their place. For some of my favorite examples of travel essays, see “An Unexpected Light” by Jason Elliot, and “Dark Star Safari” by Paul Theroux.

My goal is to spend my time in Uganda interviewing key orphans and doing life with them over the course of four weeks, learning about their lives and gathering research. I will also read several books on the history and politics of Uganda as well as other travel essays. My plan will then be to come back to New York and spend several months to a year writing a manuscript that will offer a picture of Uganda’s orphans which we have not yet seen. I will show how the history and politics of that part of the world have shaped the lives of the orphans and how the orphans have shaped the politics and history of Uganda.

The aim of the book is twofold: to offer a new voice to the orphans of Uganda as I tell their stories, and to inspire the church and the Western world at large to act on their behalf. In the end, I hope to show that acting on behalf of the poor and needy of the world is indeed nothing more than loving our neighbors as we love Ourselves.

 

Sidekick (or, Raxacoricofallapatorius, Part II)

Adventure. Peril. Derring-do. These are what Raxacoricofallapatorius has to do with it. In the spirit of embracing my identity–the identity I was born with, and the one I should be living out day to day–I hope to spend the next few weeks examining it and showing you, and me, how who I am on a practical, day to day level,  has been molded around who I am at my most fundamental level…who I was created to be.

Raxacoricofallapatorius is unmistakable evidence that I was made to have epic adventures.  I enjoy science fiction because I can lose myself in the world of mysterious planets and undiscovered species; I can become part of the story.  One minute, I’m Princess Leia (who else?) holding on for dear life in the cockpit of the Milennium Falcon as Han Solo navigates an asteroid field at the speed of light.  The next minute, I’m Dana Scully, running down shape-shifting aliens and battling government conspiracies. The next, I am Rose Tyler, shop girl, and I’m suddenly and quite unexpectedly being chased by mannequins who have suddenly and quite unexpectedly come to life, when this magnificent, if somewhat quirky, man who simply calls himself The Doctor, grabs my hand and saves my life (and the universe, for that matter), for the first of many, many times.  And if that wasn’t enough, he invites me into his spaceship and off we go traveling through space and time, saving the universe together from the likes of the Cybermen, the Daleks, and of course, the Slitheen of Raxacoricofallapatorius.

But it isn’t just science fiction that feeds my appetite for adventure.  I love quests and peril, I love the intrepid warrior, and most of all, I love the everyman who is unwittingly thrust into his own moment of greatness.  The great epic adventures of our time are filled with unlikely heroes. Take Harry Potter, for instance.  The poor kid was orphaned and almost killed as a baby. He had to grow up in a cupboard under the stairs in a home where he was unloved, neglected, and treated like a slave. Every parental figure he ever had was violently murdered–most of them right before his eyes.  He was hated by half his school, denounced by the government and the press on several occasions, and forced to fight for his own life at least once a year. Needless to say, old Harry had it a little rough, but in the end, (spoiler alert) he rid the world of its greatest danger and restored peace to the lives of the people he loved.

Or take The Chronicles of Narnia. They tell the story of the Pevensies: four ordinary school children who stumble quite unwittingly into an unfamiliar and strange land full of evil and political corruption and who rise to stand on the side of good, defeating the forces of evil, and become kings and queens in the newly liberated Narnia, ruling justly and indeed being remembered as the architects of Narnia’s Golden Age.

And, of course, The Lord of the Rings tells the story of the most unlikely hero of all–a tiny, nature-loving, meek Hobbit named Frodo Baggins who trudges across a continent on his stumpy little Hobbit legs, enduring battles and poisonous wounds, fording rivers and sleeping in the rocky wilderness, all the while being hunted by terrible creatures, fearing for his life at every turn, and moment by moment becoming more and more enslaved to the very evil he has gone on his quest to destroy. But destroy it he does, and becomes a legend in the process.

I love these stories because somewhere, deep down, I sense that I was made for that kind of adventure.  And the truth is, I was. We all were. Adventure is part of our God-given identity.  We are the unlikely heroes. We are the plucky sidekicks. As a human being bound to the earth and its immediate environs, I can’t jump into The Doctor’s time-and-space machine, as much as I’d like to, and see the universe one planet at a time. I can’t save the world with a flick of my wand or jump through my grandmother’s closet into a mysterious land of talking animals and evil witches. But that’s ok. Because these stories are just a reflection, a hint, of the real adventure. And the real adventure is full of unlikely heroes and epic battles between good and evil. There is a valiant Hero on a white horse and there are plenty of damsels in distress. There is sacrifice and sorrow, and ultimately redemption and salvation and happily-ever-after.

That’s the adventure I was made for. I have been designed for mystery and intrigue and for happily-ever-after. God made me to be a part of His story, Jesus secured my role as both sidekick and unlikely hero, and the Holy Spirit shows me the plot day after day and tells me where to stand to get the most action.

Raxacoricofallapatorius reminds me that I have an adventure of my own–a quest filled with peril and mystery, not to mention quite a spectacular love story. And with this adventure, I don’t have to imagine I’m someone else. I am the sidekick, the unlikely hero. I have no idea what tomorrow holds, what battles I will fight, what mountains I will climb, or which alien species I’ll have to face (my preference is Time Lord). But I know that there will be a happy ending, and that makes it all worth it.

 

Raxacoricofallapatorius

Raxacoricofallapatorius. Makes me giggle every time. Go ahead and say it a few times. After awhile, it begins to roll quite freely off the tongue, really.  It is possibly my favorite word to say, and it is the key to a part of me that I’ve only recently decided to embrace. I AM A SCI-FI NERD!!

For those of you who don’t know, Raxacoricofallapatorius is the home planet of the Slitheen family, featured in a couple of episodes of arguably the best television show in the world, and inarguably (meaning, I absolutely refuse to hear any argument to the contrary) the best television show in Britain, Doctor Who. The Slitheen family enjoys sucking out people’s insides and using their outsides as disguises for the purpose of penetrating such governmental strongholds as 10 Downing Street in the always-vain effort to destroy/enslave the inhabitants of earth/the universe typical of the hostile/misunderstood alien races against whom The Doctor and his varying plucky sidekicks often find themselves pitted from week to week.

I doubt that any of you is surprised that I’m a sci-fi nerd. I’m not very cool to begin with. I mean, my dad is a sci-fi nerd, so I didn’t really have a chance! I grew up immersed in Star Wars, Star Trek–the original and The Next Generation–and the old Doctor Who, long before the Slitheen ever descended from, say it with me, Raxacoricofallapatorius. (That WAS fun, wasn’t it!) I suppose I could have overcome the whole sci-fi thing if I had really wanted to.  But I didn’t. And I’ve realized recently that there’s a very good reason for that…but we’ll save that one for later.

I admit I’ve been a little less than prompt in writing this second post.  It isn’t for lack of trying.  I have several half-finished posts sitting in my account, languishing in word purgatory, just hoping I’ll finish them off and send them out into the world. It seems that every time I started a blog, I realized I either had too much to say or nothing significant to say, and so I would just put it away and try another day. And then last night, something dawned on me. I was having a blogging identity crisis! The problem wasn’t so much with what I wanted to say as with who I wanted to be. Tossing oneself into the blogosphere, right out in the open like this, forces one to begin defining things. And I just wasn’t sure which me to be.

Then I was sitting in church last night and my pastor said something that clicked in my head. He said that in our culture, we look to build our identity, to create it, from the things that we do or have or achieve, or from the way we look or our skills, etc. But that’s insane! (His words.) Yeah, insane! (Mine.) It’s backwards! Because my identity is already defined for me. God has told me who I am right there in the Bible. The challenge is not creating an identity, but living out the one I already have! I keep trying to do it backwards by taking what’s outside myself or what’s in the future and molding myself so that those things become my identity, when it would be so much easier to do it the way I’m supposed to and just embrace who I am already according to the One who made me in the first place and let the things that are outside me and in the future mold themselves around that truer identity. To quote my 12-year-old self, “Duh!” Man, it’s tiring being an idiot. Maybe that’s why I’m exhausted all the time.

So what does, together now, Raxacoricofallapatorius have to do with it all? Well, I think I’ll tell you tomorrow, because there’s alot more to this story and our attention spans just aren’t what they used to be. So practice saying Raxacoricofallapatorius (see, it’s getting easier) real hard, and as a treat tomorrow I might even tell you about the Shadow Proclamation, the Medusa Cascade, and the skies of Gallifrey–before the great Time War against Davros and the Daleks, that is.

 

Life, the Universe, and Everything

I suppose there comes a time in every technically-not-yet-but-doggone-it-I’m-gonna-give-it-the-old-Harvard-try writer’s life when she has to bite the proverbial bullet, lay down the pen and paper, and leap for the back steps of the quickly retreating techno-train before it leaves her eating gravel and shaking the dust of bygone days out of her split ends. The all aboard has sounded, calling me to leave my notebook-toting, .doc-bound ways, and summoning me on to that magical land called the Blogosphere.

It is with reluctance that I leave my happy home.  My writing is tucked safely away in its folder, buried in the Documents file in my Finder.  It sits there, content, unjudged, basking in the bliss of existing for existence’s sake, lazily dreaming of someday making its debut in a memoir or obituary.  

But the future is calling, and far be it from me to miss the train entirely.  So I’m becoming a blogger. I’m shaking off the cozy blanket of anonymity, doing my happy dance for good measure, and joining the conversation.

The blog idea has been percolating for quite some time, but now that I’m ready to finally take the leap to becoming a published writer, I thought it might just be the kind of journey to share with a few friends.  So this is me saying, “Hey Non-Descript Human! I like you! Wanna come with me while I write this book?”

That’s right, after years of dreaming (read: procrastinating) I’m going to write a book, and I would love for you to join me.  It promises to be an adventure…you know, masked men on horses, gravity-defying leaps between skyscrapers, and general swashbuckling.  The usual. 

So come along. I can’t promise it will be pretty, and I’m sure it won’t be easy, but it will be real. And as terrifying as that feels right now, the green pastures of the Blogosphere are calling to me, and I can’t help but hop the train.